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Comment by tombert | Hacker News Reader

I do find it a bit bizarre that the otherwise smart people that I work with, with English as their first language, will often resort to writing emails and documentation like a 14-year-old on AIM. I'm obviously much more forgiving of people that had to learn English as adults, but somewhat paradoxically I find that they typically write a lot more comprehensibly than most of the native-speaking engineers.

I'm hardly John Steinbeck or Mark Twain, but I've always felt that if I wanted to be treated like a grown-up, I should write like a grown-up, and as a result I have tried to write well. I try and be understanding of typos, because those are just honest mistakes, but when an adult sends an email to me saying something like "when r u going to do this?", I get a bit annoyed.

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I used to think like that (being the kid that wrote well in school). But now I'm not so sure anymore...

Been humbled too many times by people much, much smarter than me that wrote in smsesque. Have read too many apparently well-written texts that are nothing but bullshit written by ignorants.

Oh, most of my coworkers are smarter than me, so I'm certainly not trying to make an assessment on their IQ or any nonsense like that.

That said, I do think that writing smsesque (which I am going to steal for the future because I had never heard that term before) is a really good way to make yourself look dumber, especially to non-engineers. Even if my long and rambling writings lack substance, they still typically give the optics of someone who is smart. Is that the way it should be? Probably not, but I don't make the rules.

> I do think that writing smsesque (...) is a really good way to make yourself look dumber, especially to non-engineers.

Maybe they do that in purpose, then?. They do not need to be admired by everybody, especially not by non-engineers. Like the very rich people who dress extremely humbly, with torn-down clothes.

Yup. Anti-signal-signals are a thing. "I don't want or need to care how hard it is for you to understand me, so I'm not going to give any thought or effort to making it easier for you" is certainly a kind of signal.

The signal I get from that is arrogance, then.

Also, in an industry where “fake it till you make it” is the rallying cry, one shouldn’t appear dumb, lest one actually becomes dumb (at least in the eyes of their colleagues/superiors/reports/clients).

Exactly what came to my mind as well. A lack of care when you write can signal that you do not know how to write well, or it can signal that you don't care to write well. Neither of these are signals I want to send, both harm my reputation.

It can also be a signal that you're too busy to write well in that context.

There are two elements to writing well. One is the efficient communication of content. The other is communication of social register, relative status, and power relationships.

Hitting the right social register is an impedance matching problem that depends on the target audience.

If you go too high you risk sounding snobby, pretentious, and condescending. If you go too low you won't be credible.

People often assume this means that if you lard your verbiage with orotund circumlocutions and vague implications you'll be hitting those high register top notes.

But in fact social register doesn't map neatly to grammar/reading age/vocab.

SMSspeak in an email can - ironically - hit too high a social register because you're implying you don't have time to write a more detailed and conversational response, and you're not making the conversation a priority.

This is orthogonal to any actionable message content.

This may not apply as much to written language, but there are benefits at times to pretending to be more ignorant or dumb than you actually are. My father was actually a master at this. He was brilliant in his own ways (not the academic sense, but mechanically and socially brilliant), but had the persona of the "dumb hick" down completely. People would underestimate him, sometimes try to take advantage of him, then he would gently show his competence and they would quickly backtrack and essentially give him whatever he wanted. It's obviously manipulative, but was often a way of catching people in their own trap. Think car dealers trying to cheat him, salesmen, etc. I just can't pull it off as well without seeming fake.

I'm not sure there is validity to either appearing smarter than you are or dumber on a regular basis though, particularly with people you work with. Integrity is a much more important attribute to me in coworkers and employees than either feigned competence or feigned humility. Genuine competence or genuine humility are different matters though of course.

Ah yes, the Columbo! I have no problem doing this with bona fide scammers. But condescending to colleagues is a really bad look, IMO.

No they do not. I've seen a LOT of smsesque text that come from all sorts of different people who i'm 100% they are not trying to "appear dumber". I do not know why people do it, so i assume laziness. Smart people can be lazy too.

Soon we will be writing in emojis.

In the end all writing or speech is about communicating an idea.

My opinion is these people have learned it doesn't matter. If an idea can be conveyed in smsesque and still get the point across while being quicker to write, then why not?

I have a feeling power/authority/expert status matters here because the listeners will power through unclear communication just to gleam a glimpse of the underlying idea from this idol.

exactly!

i am reading all these replies and i found them really interesting. i think the same people being annoyed by sms-like writing, would get mad at me not using proper casing with my sentences.

at the end of the day, i think it does not matter. i am not writing a book or an article. and when i am texting, i would rather keep it short, sms-like.

i would like to understand, truly, why people get mad at such things. it has nothing to do with being disrespectful or anything.

last time someone was mad at a particular emoji. i believe it's the next form of shortening messages. and guess what? i would rather have an emoji than type a sms-like message. maybe some of us just like being efficient?

Emoji are a terrible insult to the written word. They're also an affront to imagery.

Standard images, at least, are the same image everywhere. A grid of pixels is a grid of pixels.

Emoji, however, vary from platform to platform, so what you pick may well not be what your reader sees. In some cases that may matter, in others it may not.

Furthermore, some people construct new meanings and usages for emoji that do not align with the actual descriptions from the Unicode standard. You'll only realize this if they tell you, of course. I had one of those moments with my wife a few weeks ago.

I'm still (irrationally) upset that emoji are in Unicode. They're ambiguous, ill-defined, and they are certainly not characters in the multilingual support sense of the word.

Do I use them? Yes, grudgingly, and I hate myself a little bit every time I do it.

Emoji are part of the natural oscillation of written language history between ideographic and phonetic. It has happened several times in history, there's nothing to worry about.

If that's the case then it's kind of mean, isn't it? They know that I'm a grown-up, and are writing to me like a child, effectively talking down to people.

No one is going to give you major adoration for using the word "you" instead of "u", or "are" instead of "r", so I sincerely doubt they're doing it as some sort of humbling thing.

My experience is that it's not on purpose and it's not signalling of any kind.

First, let me be clear: I'm lucky that I'm surrounded by smarter people than me. Almost all of my coworkers are incredibly intelligent people, can troubleshoot and code circles around me, and understand teamwork and building reliable software way better than me. It's a great situation to be in, because I have plenty to learn from them.

Unfortunately, they don't write very well in their native language (which is not English, by the way). They always ask me to proof read what they wrote. Full of typos and unclear sentences.

They also seem to be less well-read than me. Many don't read fiction at all; if they read anything, it's mostly books on tech. It's like their brain power is directed at other pursuits, and as a consequence their writing skill suffers.

I agree. We can write smsque in a slack channel and "its ok", but it's not OK to write like that in a document sent to customers, in a wiki that explains how a piece of software works and will stay there for years or in an email aimed at winning an argument. Those would be detrimental to the company and to the developer.

Don't write long, rambling, run on sentences, they confuse the reader. As a side note... it is always fun to read pro/con paragraphs for ballot measures and even Congressional legislation... they are masters at expert ambiguity.

Writing well doesn't mean you're smart, it just means you've put some effort into writing well. It's an exercise in empathy and consideration for one's readers, and crafting tolerable sentences with reasonably-normal usage is just the start of it. Ensuring you're writing something worth reading, with every sentence and every word, is another. "Bullshit written by ignorants" tautologically falls short of that, however fit their writing is otherwise.

I think, in my experience, that there is a middle way which Ive seen the very best use (and try to follow). Fundamentally it is not about how much you write but how well you communicate.

There is a difference in people that rattle off sms-style one liners every time, and those who know they only need one line to communicate fully.

My experience is; the former style almost always leads to an email chain where one party steadily extracts information from the other, like pulling teeth

Yes, it takes a little thought to write clearly and present the pertinent information, but it's plain bad manners to do otherwise.

Limiting this to written technical discussions, I don't get uptight about misspellings, typos or grammar errors, so long as I can unambiguously parse what they want to say. What bothers me is that txtspk is almost always unclear and frustrating. That tends to lead me to try to find folks who do write clearly, just for efficiency.

I will say that I do judge on written proficiency. Again, I don't care that much about form (although in more formal writing, mistakes are signals), I care about clarity of thought and ability to convey relevant information. Completely apart from interpersonal factors, programmers who can't write in a human language tend to be bad at writing in artificial ones.

> Been humbled too many times by people much, much smarter than me that wrote in smsesque. Have read too many apparently well-written texts that are nothing but bullshit written by ignorants.

I cannot imagine why you found them humbling. Ignorance or lack of skill are forgivable, but poor writing by someone who could do better but just doesn't care about their output or their audience is just lazy. If someone who could do better cannot be trusted with something as simple as writing a coherent message, why would you trust them with anything else?

Because they consistently deliver

> I cannot imagine why you found them humbling.

Because they were humbling to me and I learned a lot from them, despite their clumsy writing style (not because of their writing style!).

Imagine that you have worked several weeks on a problem, you are very proud of the code that you created that solves the problem elegantly; you document it with well-written, correctly punctuated comments and documentation. Then the smspeaker looks over your shoulder and says "dude, this data structure isn't necessary here, just use a table of integers and it will be faster and the code 80% shorter", which is a self-evident statement after the fact. THAT is humbling, regardless of whether the guy writes his mails in correct english or smsesque.

I don't care if you write "you" or "u". I do care a lot about clear definitions in technical writing. For example, someone could mention a "system". What exactly does he mean? Is it synonymous to "the servers" he mentions in the next paragraph? Or is there an important difference?

Even worse if people do not even read the text and only look at the diagrams. Hours of meetings could be replaced with minutes of reading.

Even worse if people do not write text at all but only PowerPoint diagrams. What is the meaning of the boxes and arrows? Is it consistent?

Maybe the responsibility should be placed on the readers as well? They should demand better writing.

And units!

Please both put the units in writing and make sure they're correct! Your network does not run at 100 milli-bits per second. A byte (B) is a lot bigger than a bit (b). Mega (M) is not the same as milli (m). Term contract prices are typical per month or per year, so when you tell me the contract is "only $25K", you haven't told me anything. Tell me it's "$25K/yr" or "$25K/mo" and you've told me something.

And acronyms!

I find that the most efficient way to get a point across is to use lists/bullet points in your email.

I have this very smart colleague who writes in long paragraphs and I always zone out somewhere in the middle.

It's a terrible way to figure out the essentials.

I much prefer PowerPoint diagrams that list the essentials over long paragraphs that include the gory details.

From my experience peer-editing class papers, bad writers aren’t dumb people. Someone would have an interesting idea and explain it cogently to me in person while sounding normal and fluent. The paper would be a train wreck, but a transcript of the verbal explanation would be worth at least a B.

It seems some people just have a disconnect between text and verbal processing.

I find it bizarre that most people don't realize writing 'correctly' is just intelligence signaling too. There's no reason for it most of the time. If I can type something faster but still just as clear by typing it less-formally, I will often do so.

"but still just as clear" is a critical qualifier in your sentence. With that stipulated, I agree. When that is absent is when there's an issue.

This is a not a matter of "Never end a sentence on a preposition." "This is the type of errant pedantry up with which I will not put."

Yeah, maybe I should have supplied a better example, since "when r u going to do this?" is fairly unambiguous, so I suppose that that is a failure of writing on my end :).

However, I've seen people us abbreviations that are incredibly difficult to parse, even for people with English as a first language. I can't imagine how difficult some of those emails can be for people that didn't grow up with the language.

I'll take a conversational email with sms shorthand and emojis explaining a bug effectively over the business major crap emails I get 30 times a day complete with greetings, farewells, oxford commas, correctly used semi colons that don't actually tell me what the problem is or what the repro steps are.

Have we arrived at the place where we have to choose one or the other? Because I choose option 3: where people do their jobs relatively well, with some amount of professionalism (which I used to think was a necessary, but not sufficient, part of doing your job well).

I recommend taking the opposite approach. I'm in a leadership role and I model my communication after the audience. This is a social bonding technique, it results in people liking you more. This is everything from formal vs informal language, mirroring body language, and using their preferred communications protocol: email, IM, phone, face to face. Any time someone has a specific quirk in their communication, instead of being annoyed, see it as an opportunity to make a new ally by modeling after them.

>I'm obviously much more forgiving of people that had to learn English as adults, but somewhat paradoxically I find that they typically write a lot more comprehensibly than most of the native-speaking engineers.

This might seem paradoxical at first, but upon further inspection you realize that those who learn a language (as opposed to acquire it) are better at it.

I also think it has to do with the fact that in order to write in a second language, you have to more-closely monitor what they're writing, because it doesn't come as natural.

I don't know any second languages, but I suspect that in order to communicate with the native-speakers of that language, you have to be a lot more deliberate about it.

You know that a lot of us in the Biz are on the spectrum Dyslexia, Dyspraxia etc - writing can be F^g Hard.

I don't identify as any of those D's. And, I'm not discounting your experiences with writing.

I wrote a book (http://shop.oreilly.com/product/0636920043027.do) and it was the hardest thing I ever did.

I love this quote from Thomas Mann: ""A writer is someone for whom writing is more difficult than it is for other people."

Keep at it, even though it tears you to shreds. It's worth it. It tears everyone who does it to shreds. You aren't alone in the way you feel about writing and you can do it too.

I am all of those as well, but learned coping mechanisms. Like proofreading like crazy and reading aloud.

Still can't spell tho, and homonyms will be the death of me.

Curious as I will sometimes find myself annoyed at a similar email... If it said "When are you going to do this?" would that be acceptable?

Yes, that is fine. I'm obviously not asking for someone to write the next Moby Dick when sending me an email asking for a status update. A short and simple message is totally fine, I just would be prefer that it be (mostly) grammatically correct.

That is easy to say, but it doesn't work that way. Your mind knows what you wanted to say and assumes it said that. Even when you read your writing again you know what you meant to say and you will skip over the bad grammar.

Note that this same problem exists in spoken speech. Someone will ask a passenger to "please adjust your window out" which makes no sense. What they really want is adjust the mirror out, but the brain knows rolling down the window is part of the task and confuses all the parts. Even when asked to repeat themselves they will repeat the same nonsense sentence without realizing it isn't doesn't make sense. (this problem was more common 30 years ago before power mirrors where the driver could adjust the mirror himself)

The only solution I've found is to sleep on it. Tomorrow I'm sure I will find a some grammar errors in this post, and likely something else that doesn't make sense. I just read over the entire post now though and I don't see anything wrong with it.

You have taken things out of their context. The syntax he was talking about is "when r u going to do this?", not honest typos. It has nothing to do with what you describe.

I mentioned earlier that I am fairly understanding of typos.

Typos are an honest mistake, and since I work with humans, they are going to make mistakes. Even using the wrong version of "its" or "it's" is ok, because at least that is an easy mistake to make.

However, when someone writes me an email using a lot of abbreviations and shorthand, like something a 14-year-old would write on AIM, it makes me feel like I'm being treated like a 14-year-old on AIM.

Do I mind if a friend does that in a text? Not at all, this is informal. But coworkers aren't inherently friends, they should be (at least in theory) adults that you have some respect for.

LOL

Oh..wait..

Yes, i can understand if you are trying to save some SMS space on a phone because the longer the SMS the more you pay, but when writing an email you do not have such limitations.

I sometimes use that when I have a low risk of typos and I am limited in my typing speed. It takes significantly more cognitive effort, and often I can just type if 9ut faster than the other way around.

"when r u going to do this?"

Why is that annoying? Its perfectly clear and concise. Good writing imo.

If I had a manager send this to me, it would impress in my mind a comical and degrading image of them hunting and pecking for keys. Doesn’t conjure much respect in an industry where computers are the main tool, IMO.

Well the hypothetical manager would have no control over the images of people you apparently form for whatever reasons.

Solipsism. In communication, intent and perception are both factors that affect how the parties view each other. This is what "know your audience" means.

> apparently form for whatever reasons

I already gave you the reason: they aren't communicating professionally. They do have some control over how they project their image to others. After all, they're the one writing the message.

This is getting into the realm of philosophy. According to Stoicism, one has no control over others thoughts. I personally think thats a quite valid view.

I would evaluate a message from a manager by practical rubrics. 1. Clarity. 2. Comprehensiveness. 3. Terseness. Even those are fairly subjective, anything beyond that is so subjective it could counjour perhaps any image in someones head depending on the person. According my my rubrics above, the managers message was fine.

As with most things in life, it's about signaling. At work I always type with correct grammar to seem professional. On twitter I deliberately don't use capital letters or apostrophes to seem relaxed. Not because I actually care (and I don't care what anyone else does), but it influences how I'm seen. I really have no idea why it matters so much to some people, other than generic "its just our culture" arguments.

Seems like u are engaging in much that you are aware is unnecessary bullshit.

I personally wouldnt be happy doing that. I value intellectual honesty extremely highly for some reason.

Have you read this? I like it.

http://classics.mit.edu/Epictetus/epicench.html

Its an Enchiridion for Stoicism. Literally a handbook designed to be carried around and consulted as situations arise.

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